I need to address a huge misconception. Brand presence in LLM answer retrieval is NOT only about "optimizing" your website for AI search.
To appear in LLM answer recommendations for bottom of funnel / high intent / high competition prompts, your brand must be present on relevant 3rd party listings and directories (whether it's "pay to play" or not).
I broke down a real life example with Justin Norris on his podcast.
What are the best identity theft protection solutions?
CHAT GPT ONLY EXTRACTS INFO FROM 3RD PARTY REVIEW PAGES!
Such as... PCMag, CNET, Tom’s Guide, Forbes, Nerd Wallet, Security dot org, etc.—instead of linking to vendor pages.
Even when a brand is mentioned in the answer, the vendor's website is NOT cited or credited as a source.
This marks a return to distribution-oriented SEO. We used to think about "SERP DOMINATION" strategies back in the day to try and occupy as many 10 blue links as possible.
That strategy is coming back full circle, but engineered for AI search instead of classic search.
Credit to Scrunch AI for the insights in this video. This is *NOT* a sponsored post. I am not affiliated with Scrunch AI...
VIDEO EXPLAINER BELOW!
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